It's time to start paying attention to the right hand panel on the Home page! We've scrapped the stale "Updates" section and replaced it with "Headlines". What's the difference? The new headlines panel will be updated frequently and cover a larger range of topics that you're interested in like tournament openings and new maps.

Now that we have this better communication tool we're going to make updates smaller and more frequent, and install new maps one by one instead of large batches.

So don't miss out on anything - keep an eye on those headlines!

Attendance Stats

An attendance statistic now appears on the player profile. It is calculated as the % of your turns that you actually took. Hopefully this will help you avoid deadbeats and encourage people to find "account sitters" when they leave town.

Ratings Reloaded

After an extensive Community Consultation we've made some changes to Ratings to make the system work much better for you. Here is what's new:

You can attach descriptive tags to a rating. This should let a rating communicate more about the player without opening up the door to all that abusive language and nonsense we've seen with written feedback. The initial list of 35 tags is sure to evolve, so please share your recommendations for tags in the Suggestions & Bug report forum.

You can now write a written response to any rating that you've received. This is a good way to defend yourself if you feel a rating is unfair.

The "Attendance" attribute is dropped now that we have it automatically calculated on your profile.

A new "Gameplay" attribute has been introduced: "Gameplay: Measures the player's ability to play an enjoyable game (not the player's ability to win). Covers strategy, diplomacy, teamwork, etc..."

The "Teamwork" attribute is also dropped because it isn't really needed now that we have Gameplay and Good/Bad Teammate tags. All Teamwork ratings of 5 stars are converted to a Good Teammate tag and all Teamwork ratings of 1 star are converted to a Bad Teammate tag.

In the "Leave rating for:" sections we now show different star symbols for those players that are yet to be re-rated.

I'd like to thank everyone who shared their constructive input to improve the ratings system. Hopefully these changes will go a long way towards making it more usable, informative and less open to abuse.

There is still one remaining issue that we have yet to tackle: the fact that different people rate based on different scales (i.e. some typically leave 5s others typically leave 3s). We didn't include a solution to get this update live sooner, and we'll continue to discuss the best approach in the community consultation, whether it involves changing the # of stars or normalizing them based on everyone's average rating left...

Excellent work Lack I have only one thing I still would have liked changed tho. What about changing the fourth star to Good instead of above avarage? I would leave a more correcet rating, as I mean avarage is not nessaseraly a positive word..Anybody got any thoughts`?

attendance percentages are great, even though mine is only at 98% because i was sick recently.the new gameplay rating is great.being able to respond to bad ratings is great.the tags? not so great. noone will look through them anyways... maybe if you summarized somewhere on the persons raitngs page how many of each tag they received, but this way all it means is a lot of scrolling. and with the amount of ratings being handed out left and right due to the ratings medals, noone is going to do that.

The scale should be cut down to 3 - positive, neutral and negative (wonder where i got that from...) or good, neutral, bad (notice how i don't use the word average). As another user said, you can think of it as a rating of the rater's experience of that user.

Now that you've already managed to drop the attendance and teamwork ratings, with just a little nudge, you can get rid of two of the others and go back to having only one rating, now that you've introduced tags to descriptively complement the rating. Is it really that necessary to have Fairplay, Gameplay and Attitude?

If you do put it down to 3 "stars", i think the feedback numbering system was a lot nicer instead of the average that's currently used (just an opinion) and that, whether or not you include the neutrals as well, you could just have a sum of all the positive (, neutral) and negative ratings a person has received next to their screen name (as you did before).

There's no shame in leaving no feedback, and I think fluff feedback is part of the problem with the current system. I think the ratings medal should be eliminated as soon as possible.

Thanks for allowing written response to feedback, think that's a good one.

Thanks for the hard work, for the updates, for the interest in community feedback and, obviously, for the site

amazingly done lack! and you too twill!my only complaint is asshol players - i mean rude ppl - will still be able to leave unfair ratings, to prevent this i think the rating should be done in a game by game basis, ALL players MUST rate (unless u hav already rated that player, but u can change it) and for each player the most common rating for each field is given.

that way if some bitch - i mean jerk - gives an unfair 1 star, since only the most common answer is taken it will be ignored

if magically u r playing a game where i hav been rated by EVERY person before, u get a "no rating" for that game.

daydream, there are big big plans for those tags, but again, lack is going to be focusing on much smaller iterations now that we have the headline feed, so be sure to tag people, and once there is a critical mass of tags, CC will be adding some very cool new features based on it

maique, there was an intentional move away from "bad, neutral, good" for various reasons. There has been some discussion in the community consultation of moving back towards that, so head on over there and see what's been said and add your voice!

Cairns, very soon now that the new map inspect tool is up and the headlines are live - one of the first will hopefully be the british isles revamp, and so we've given it the first [maps] headline to make sure people see it and take a look (to avoid another classic map fiasco). All others will follow

a.sub, loved the language corrections there People can still leave a-hole ratings for you, but by having the chance to respond, you can point out what a "jerk" they are.Just for the record - we still will not be intervening in ratings complaints, it's still up to you to sort it out

Any reason why the attendance can't be at the top of the ratings page instead of buried in the profile? They are really both integral parts of the overall conduct of an individual player as seen by the other players. Having associated data on two different screens is a bit awkward to use.

The explanatory tags are great. They're all valid, and I like the idea of not having to wade through some less than polite rhetoric. With 35 tags (possibly more in the future) to choose from, could they be grouped a bit better. Right now, the arrangement seems less than logically configured.

i would say someone's attendance percentage is more important to me than thier ratings. what bothers me the most around here is getting in a game and then having to wait forever and a day to take my turn. i wish your attendance was shown more prominetly. if you go to the game finder, you have to click on someones name to see the percentage, which takes you away from game finder, so it's kind of a pain to check the attendance before you pick a game. but, i'm not complaining...i'm glad we have it now. it's just that, ratings are opinions from other players..which my not mean anything really. attendance is fact...if you find a bad one...then you know you have found someone you really don't want to waste your time getting in a game with.

maique, there was an intentional move away from "bad, neutral, good" for various reasons. There has been some discussion in the community consultation of moving back towards that, so head on over there and see what's been said and add your voice!

Thanks for the info Twill, but i had already read the entirety of the latest community consultation and had already added my comment, or rather, testament to the discussion. But mine was the last one before the most recent update, so I thought I might as well make a shorter and more to the point comment here as it would more likely be read.

1 to 5 ratings are too nuanced to get everyone on the same note, i think. And CC should be about the game more than the nuances of how one rates or gets rated.It should be intuitive, not based on a ruleset that's unenforceable, unenforced and not followed (even if were not followed by "only" 25% of raters, it would still make the rating guidelines sort of invalid or, better put, irrelevant).So pardon me for insisting on a 3 point scale, whatever you want to call each individual step. (And insist I must that "Average" will put people off, whilst "neutral" was just that)

There are people suggesting that everyone in a game should rate for a person to be rated, or something to that effect.. This doesn't make too much sense to me. I understand them wanting to weed out the more irrational ratings, but just use the feedback response. I really don't think rating should be compulsory. Quite the contrary, I'd rather someone not say anything rather than rate for no reason...

...or coz they want a stupid medal. Have I said I find the Ratings Medal absolutely ridiculous and counter productive? Even if your only intention were to get people to rate so you could have more test cases to improve the rating framework, just asking would be fine. The medal doesn't necessarily create a critical mass of valid ratings).

I'm still relatively new to this. What is everyone's definition of a "deadbeat?" The attendance % of turns taken on time is great and seems to eliminate the need for a 1-5 star rating for attendance. As for deadbeats, if there's the expectation for players to take their turn every 3 hours, or whatever the expectation is, then don't enter a game that has 24 hour time limit for a turn. I've never played in a speed game, and unless I have zero responsibilities in real life [I'm not suggesting speed game players DON'T have responsibilities ] I will continue to shy away from them. So, is a "deadbeat" someone who waits until the "eleventh hour" to make every single move?

BTW, when the budget affords, I'll be upgrading to premium as this is an awesome site

This looks like a step in the right direction, but I don't think I like seeing the "Attendance" value disappear. I recently played a game with a player who waited until the 23rd (and 1/2) hour on each of his turns. The fact that he showed up consistantly is going to boost his attendance %, but his prior rating was quite low because he (or she?) was ranked low in that category.

Instead of the rating wouldn't it more useful to have an average time to take start turns included with percentage of turns taken? It would have to have casual and speed games separated but it offers more utility than just the percentage on it own.

ram1961 wrote:Good changes. Thanks for the better system of rating other players.

Any reason why the attendance can't be at the top of the ratings page instead of buried in the profile? They are really both integral parts of the overall conduct of an individual player as seen by the other players. Having associated data on two different screens is a bit awkward to use.

I liked the old feedback system better than the ratings. It was telling me more about the respective player, and it was often fun to read. But I don´t care enough to really get involved in all the discussions & threads about the issue.

I have one complaint though: Since positive ratings for Team-Play were obviously automatically translated into "Good Teammate" tags, I have now several of those tags from people, that I never was on a team with. I didn´t understand, why those people were allowed to give me a Team-Play Rating anyway. It´s kind of stupid ...